A couple days ago I decided to snoop around the files for Devil Summoner to see just how a translation should go.
Upon inspection the game seemed pretty well laid out. Lots of separation between actual files.
I noticed immediately several file types that caught my eye.
.FON - The characters for this game is stored in separated files
.EVC - No clue, I thought initially this is where the text would be but it's not. You can see files that hold text referenced by name usually in these though.
.EVE - EVENT! This is actually where the text is stored as well as other event data.
I figured that out by swapping stuff and rebuilding over and over, I'm clueless when it comes to reverse engineering assembly or anything but I'm guessing that's going to have to change if I intend on finishing this out. hahaaa...
The main guy is right here, FON16.FON - this is the main font used for dialog. It contains 0-9, A-Z uppers and lowers, Hirigana, Katakana, and Kanji.
The number of glyphs totals to about 1872.
The biggest hurdle was figuring out how ATLUS encoded this stuff. I eventually just happened upon the script for the opening in EVFILE_0.EVE, starting at offset 0x5000. So I prodded out a few letter and correlated that they are just linearly called from the font file left to right. For example, 0 = 00 01, A = 00 0B. The game stores each character in 2 bytes since you can reference any of the 1872 glyphs. I wrote a script to splice up the FON16 file into it's 16x16 indices and named them what they were in hexadecimal. I made a small table for English language and a simple program to inject English sentences into the game this way.
There also seems to be a number of dialog control codes they seem to be formatted like this 80 XX.
80 00 End Dialog - this will exit the dialog and move on to the next thing in the event.
80 01 - auto scroll after line. This just signals the game when to move the text up in the box
80 03 - Wait for button press. This code will stop the game and wait for a button press before continuing.
All this info seems to be consistent wherever you may see the big 16x16 font used. I used this same method to partially translate MENU.BIN
It seems the naming system essentially forces you to use the japanese alphabet though. I'm not smart enough to even begin about hacking in an english option there, though my hunch is that you may be able to use the code name input as your in for doing so.
There's several other font files I have not found in the game files where they are used yet but I have my guesses.
FONT8.FON is a 1bpp 8x8 font for menus and battles
FNT18X12.FON - 18*12 font, only contains ENGLISH upper and lower case and some special characters
FNT12X12.FON - 12*12 font that contains only kanji
FONT6.FON - I can't make heads or tails of this file
FONT12.FON - Contains Upper/Lower case english, hirigana, katakana, special symbols, and kanji. Used for Demons maybe??
ICON.FON - No idea on this one either
KANJI.FON - Contains High Resolution Symbols, Kanji, Kana, Greek, and English. No clue where this is used. Naming menu?
This is about as far as I've gotten. On the to-do is to make an encoding table so I can easily pick actual script out of files and to make a list of files that actually need translated. I've definitely got my work cut out for me here.
Upon inspection the game seemed pretty well laid out. Lots of separation between actual files.
I noticed immediately several file types that caught my eye.
.FON - The characters for this game is stored in separated files
.EVC - No clue, I thought initially this is where the text would be but it's not. You can see files that hold text referenced by name usually in these though.
.EVE - EVENT! This is actually where the text is stored as well as other event data.
I figured that out by swapping stuff and rebuilding over and over, I'm clueless when it comes to reverse engineering assembly or anything but I'm guessing that's going to have to change if I intend on finishing this out. hahaaa...
The main guy is right here, FON16.FON - this is the main font used for dialog. It contains 0-9, A-Z uppers and lowers, Hirigana, Katakana, and Kanji.
The number of glyphs totals to about 1872.
The biggest hurdle was figuring out how ATLUS encoded this stuff. I eventually just happened upon the script for the opening in EVFILE_0.EVE, starting at offset 0x5000. So I prodded out a few letter and correlated that they are just linearly called from the font file left to right. For example, 0 = 00 01, A = 00 0B. The game stores each character in 2 bytes since you can reference any of the 1872 glyphs. I wrote a script to splice up the FON16 file into it's 16x16 indices and named them what they were in hexadecimal. I made a small table for English language and a simple program to inject English sentences into the game this way.
There also seems to be a number of dialog control codes they seem to be formatted like this 80 XX.
80 00 End Dialog - this will exit the dialog and move on to the next thing in the event.
80 01 - auto scroll after line. This just signals the game when to move the text up in the box
80 03 - Wait for button press. This code will stop the game and wait for a button press before continuing.
All this info seems to be consistent wherever you may see the big 16x16 font used. I used this same method to partially translate MENU.BIN
It seems the naming system essentially forces you to use the japanese alphabet though. I'm not smart enough to even begin about hacking in an english option there, though my hunch is that you may be able to use the code name input as your in for doing so.
There's several other font files I have not found in the game files where they are used yet but I have my guesses.
FONT8.FON is a 1bpp 8x8 font for menus and battles
FNT18X12.FON - 18*12 font, only contains ENGLISH upper and lower case and some special characters
FNT12X12.FON - 12*12 font that contains only kanji
FONT6.FON - I can't make heads or tails of this file
FONT12.FON - Contains Upper/Lower case english, hirigana, katakana, special symbols, and kanji. Used for Demons maybe??
ICON.FON - No idea on this one either
KANJI.FON - Contains High Resolution Symbols, Kanji, Kana, Greek, and English. No clue where this is used. Naming menu?
This is about as far as I've gotten. On the to-do is to make an encoding table so I can easily pick actual script out of files and to make a list of files that actually need translated. I've definitely got my work cut out for me here.
